LCIL International Law Centre Podcast

A series of three lectures by Professor Tom Ginsburg, Leo Spitz Professor of International Law, Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Research Scholar, Professor of Political Science, The University of Chicago Law School. All lectures are held at the Lauterpacht Centre at 6 pm on Tuesday 12 March, Wednesday 13 March and Thursday 14 March with a Q&A at 1 pm on Friday 15 March (sandwich lunch from 12.30 pm). Lectur...

Lecture summary: The WTO Agreement on TBT (Technical Barriers to Trade) aims at taming NTBs (nontariff barriers), the main instrument segmenting markets nowadays. Some of the terms used in TBT to flesh out the commitments undertaken are borrowed from the GATT, and some originate in the modern regulatory reality as expressed through SDOs (standard-development organizations). The TBT does not share...

Lecture summary: 2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of two momentous events in twentieth-century history: the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both remain tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global antisemitism, and American foreign policy. Yet the surprising connections between Zionism and th...

Lecture summary: What parts of their uncomfortable histories should universities remember, and how? Recent debates have erupted at institutions of higher learning over their ties to early benefactors who held views antithetical to the values that today’s leading schools espouse. These controversies stir public “memory work” through which learning communities negotiate their relationship to the pas...

Lecture summary: The International Criminal Court is engaged in investigations in a number of situations of ongoing conflict. Recent scholarship and practice has paid attention to the question of whether the threat of prosecution at the international level contributes to the pursuit of domestic trials. Implicit in much of this work is an assumption that contributing to the pursuit of such domestic...

Lecture summary: This talk reflects upon the evolution of territorial sovereignty in international law. Professor Shaw will trace the classic origin and formulation of this key concept and discuss the major challenges to it, from internal threats such as self-determination and secession to external challenges such as the rise of international human rights, international criminal law and internatio...

Dr Christine Schwöbel-Patel is Associate Professor at Warwick Law School, University of Warwick. She previously held positions at the University of Liverpool, Leiden University and Kings' College London. Christine researches and teaches in international law. Her research focuses on questions of conflict and humanitarianism, mass atrocities and institutions of law, as well as pedagogy. These themes...

Lecture summary: This essay refracts the ICC’s criminal conviction and reparations order in the Al Mahdi case into the much broader frame of increasingly heated public debates over the protection, removal, defacement, relocation, display, and destruction of cultural heritage in all forms: monuments, artefacts, language instruction, art, and literature. What might the work product of the ICC in the...

Round table discussion: 'International Law in an Era of Nationalism'. Speakers: Prof John Dugard SC - Doughty Street Chambers; Sir Christopher Greenwood GBE CMG QC; Prof Catherine Barnard - University of Cambridge; Dr Lorand Bartels - University of Cambridge; Dr Sarah Nouwen - LCIL Co-Director. https://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/press/events/2018/11/lcil-event-international-law-era-nationalism-round-table...

Contrasting how Malcolm X and Hannah Arendt approached the question of human rights, this lecture examines how violence is central and hierarchy is intrinsic to the political operations of humanity. It argues that talking about humanity requires a preparedness to examine the violent legacies of humanism, including its anti-colonial kinds. Dr Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and...

Lecture summary: The problem confronting the users of international law, whether academic or professional, is very often not whether a rule of customary law has come into existence (as has recently been handled with such success by the ILC), but rather, granted that a rule of customary law on a given subject does exist, how to establish what its specific content is, for the purpose of then applyin...

Lecture summary: At various points throughout this work, Grotius makes reference to a category that he variously calls 'morals' (moralia), 'moral things' (res morales) or 'the matter of morals' (materia moralis). This field of entities is always invoked in conjunction with certain principles of reasoning that shape the scope and application of more strictly legal principles and reasoning. This lec...

Lecture summary: The role of civil society in drafting and the adoption of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court (ICC) is well known, as is the contribution of civil society to advocating for states to ratify the Statute and implement its provisions. However, despite the importance of these contributions, such opportunities do not constitute direct participation in the formal proce...

This talk will consider the changes which have taken place in recent years in attitudes towards questions of public international law and of foreign affairs when they arise in the context of domestic litigation. David Lloyd Jones, Lord Lloyd-Jones, became a Justice of The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in October 2017. Lord Lloyd-Jones was born and brought up in Pontypridd, Glamorgan. He atte...

Lecture Summary: The lecture will consider the role of the conflict of laws before international courts and tribunals. Very rarely is the conflict of laws examined in the writings on public international law or is applied in the decisions of international courts and tribunals. And that is surprising given that disputes that become the subject of adjudication before investment courts and tribunals...

​In this talk, Anthea Roberts will introduce her new book Is International Law International? which was awarded the American Society of International Law's 2018 Book Prize for the preeminent contribution to creative scholarship. Anthea Roberts is Associate Professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University. She specializes in public internati...

Lecture summary: Recent literature on human rights has proposed to go beyond the dualism of essentialist versus historicist conceptions of human rights. It is argued that ‘the history of human rights’ has to be expanded as ‘to include a moral history of the century after the Enlightenment’ (Hoffmann). This lecture highlights as well the inquiry of continuities within the epistemological framework...

Part 1: From Colonial Companies to Global Corporations In this lecture, I will introduce the problematic of the corporation in international law. The modern corporation is often understood to be a child of the state, a child which has grown too powerful to control. However, we need to go back further than the advent of the modern corporation in order to see that the Company emerged in the early mo...

The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law held a Symposium on Friday, 13 October 2017 to celebrate the life and work of its founder, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht CBE QC LLD, Honorary Professor Emeritus of International Law at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Trinity College, and founder and Honorary Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, who died on 8 February 2017. The video pr...

In this lecture, which is based on his 2017 German Law Journal article, Matthew will argue for a reading of the work of Martti Koskenniemi—arguably the most significant international legal thinker of the post-Cold War era—as an exercise in (Lacanian) psychoanalysis. Excavating the links between Koskenniemi and French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and analyzing the origins of those links in Koskenni...

Lecture summary: A question that is often under-theorised, or perhaps more accurately, is taken for granted, is the systematicity of international law. The systemic nature of international law too often is simply presumed, and rests on a vision of international law as merely a body of rules. In this lecture, an alternative account of international law's systematicity will be advanced, one which en...

The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL), University of Cambridge hosts a regular Friday lunchtime lecture series on key areas of International Law. Previous subjects have included UN peacekeeping operations, the advisory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, the crime of aggression, whaling, children and military tribunals, and theories and practices for proving individua...

The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL), University of Cambridge hosts a regular Friday lunchtime lecture series on key areas of International Law. Previous subjects have included UN peacekeeping operations, the advisory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, the crime of aggression, whaling, children and military tribunals, and theories and practices for proving individua...

The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL), University of Cambridge hosts a regular Friday lunchtime lecture series on key areas of International Law. Previous subjects have included UN peacekeeping operations, the advisory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, the crime of aggression, whaling, children and military tribunals, and theories and practices for proving individua...

The Sir Eli Lauterpacht Lecture is an annual series held by the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law to commemorate the unique contribution that its founder made to international law. This inaugural lecture was delivered as part of the Symposium 'Sir Elihu Lauterpacht: a celebration of his life and work', on Friday, 13th October 2017. The 2017 lecture, entitled 'A return to the Caroline Corres...